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Men marry women wishing they will never change, but they do. Women marry men wishing they will be able to change them, but they don't. When I was young, even during my University studies, I was a real disaster in anything related to order and tidiness. My room was always a mess. Whenever my mother or any other would try to change my ways (even a little bit), I would say what many like me love to say: - "In the disorder, I know where everything is. When my mother makes some order, I can't find anything". And to demonstrate that the half-joke at the beginning of this article is not true, I must say that I changed a lot since I married. My home won't appear in a decoration magazine, but it is not close at all to my young-days' complete-mess room. The other reason I have to train me all the time to be a more tidy person is that I work in FPGA design. So if you are rolling your eyes thinking that order has nothing to do with design, and I'd better publi...

Many times I find myself in the need of generating data for testing. We need data for verification, either done on simulation or on the real target. One easy way to test our system is to generate data vectors on RAM. Altera RAM IP includes the ability to initialize RAM contents during power-up by means of a .hex file. One problem of the .hex file format is that it is quite unreadable for humans. Altera came to our rescue with the .mif format, which is text based and very easy to understand. The application I present below initializes a memory (generating an .hex file). The size and width of the memory are parameters. The Matlab application generates both a init_mem.mif and a init_mem.hex file. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 %------------------------------------------- % Generate Parameters ram_size = 256 ; % In words word_size = 16...